The level of the forest floor lifted ten feet above Thompson’s head so that he could see nothing beyond the earthy rim save the tops of trees.  He kept his seat while Mike tied the bow to a birch trunk with a bit of rope.  He knew that they expected to land him at his destination before evening fell.  This did not impress him as a destination.  He did not know what Lone Moose would be like.  The immensity of the North had left him rather incredulous.  Nothing in the North, animate or inanimate, corresponded ever so little to his preconceived notions of what it would be like.  His ideas of the natives had been tinctured with the flavor of Hiawatha and certain Leatherstocking tales which he had read with a sense of guilt when a youngster.  He had really started out with the impression that Lone Moose was a collection of huts and tents about a log church and a missionary house.  The people would be simple and high-minded, tillers of the soil in summer, trappers of fur in winter, humble seekers after the Light he was bringing.  But he was not a fool, and he had been compelled to forego that illusion.  Then he had surmised that Lone Moose might be a replica of Fort Pachugan.  MacLeod had partly disabused his mind of that.

But he still could not keep out of his mind’s eye a somewhat hazy picture of Lone Moose as a group of houses on the bank of a stream, with Indians and breeds—­no matter how dirty and unkempt—­going impassively about their business, an organized community, however rude.  Here he saw nothing save the enfolding forest he had been passing through since dawn.  He scarcely troubled to ask himself why they had stopped.  Breyette and MacDonald were given to casual haltings.  He sat in irritable discomfort brushing aside the hordes of mosquitoes that rose up from the weedy brink and the shore thickets to assail his tender skin.  He did not notice that MacDonald was waiting for him to move.  Mike Breyette looked down on him from the top of the bank.

“Well, we here, M’sieu Thompson,” he said.

“What?” Thompson roused himself.  “Here?  Where is the village?”

Breyette waved a hand upstream.

“She’s ‘roun’ de nex’ bend,” said he.  “Two-three hundred yard.  Dees w’ere de meeshonaire have hees cabanne.”

Thompson could not doubt Breyette’s statement.  He recalled now that Mike had once told him the mission quarters were built a little apart from the village.  But he peered up through the screen of birch and willow with a swift wave of misgiving.  The forest enclosed him like the blank walls of a cell.  He shrank from it as a sensitive nature shrinks from the melancholy suggestiveness of an open grave, and he could not have told why he felt that strange form of depression.  He was wholly unfamiliar with any form of introspective inquiry, any analysis of a mental state.  He had never held sad intellectual inquest over a dead hope, nor groped blindly for a ray of light in the inky blackness of a soul’s despair.